Patricia Woods has added a photo to the pool:
Stueyman has added a photo to the pool:
To the right of the frame is the engine stack of the Alkimos, to the left is the drilling ship Beverley, currently working j. The new Alkimos wind farm.
Stueyman has added a photo to the pool:
The waterfront at Alkimos Beach, WA. So far north I almost got a nosebleed!
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Author says pace of change in GCSE English literature texts is too slow and tide is turning against inclusion
The Booker prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo has called for renewed efforts to diversify the school curriculum in England, warning that young people are growing up in a society where “doors are closing” and the tide is turning against inclusion.
There has been progress in the diversity of texts on offer in the GCSE English literature curriculum, but uptake in schools is still low with just 1.9% of GCSE pupils in England studying books by authors of colour, up from 0.7% five years ago, according to a report.
Continue reading...Pilot comes at same time as pledge to offer all smokers and ex-smokers lung cancer screening by 2030
NHS England is to trial a combination of AI and robot-assisted care to speed up the detection and diagnosis of lung cancer, the UK’s most lethal form of the disease.
The trial comes at the same time as the health service pledges to offer all smokers and ex-smokers the chance to be screened for lung cancer by 2030.
Continue reading...Joseph Rowntree Foundation finds problem is ‘deeper and more damaging than at any point in the last 30 years’
The UK’s poorest families are getting poorer, with record numbers of people classed as in “very deep poverty” – meaning their annual household incomes fail to cover the cost of food, energy bills and clothing, according to analysis.
Although overall relative poverty levels have flatlined in recent years at about 21% of the population, life for those below the breadline has got materially worse as they try to subsist on incomes many thousands of pounds beneath the poverty threshold.
Continue reading...Sammy Yahood accuses Labor of ‘tyranny’ after the government cancelled his visa hours before his flight was due to depart
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The government has cancelled the visa of a Jewish influencer who has previously called for the ban of Islam and was booked to speak at several events in Australia.
The right-leaning Australian Jewish Association (AJA) said Sammy Yahood’s visa was cancelled three hours before his flight was due to depart.
Continue reading...Authorities allege Ryan Wedding, 44, ‘turned to a life of crime’ after his snowboarding career ended
Ryan Wedding, the Canadian former Olympic snowboarder accused of cocaine distribution and orchestrating several murders, appeared on Monday in a southern California courtroom for arraignment.
The 44-year-old has been charged with drug trafficking, conspiracy to murder, witness tampering and money laundering, among other charges. Authorities allege that after his snowboarding career, Wedding “turned to a life of crime” as a narcotics trafficker and led an organization that moved cocaine from South America to the US and Canada.
Continue reading...:format(jpeg):fill(f8f8f8,true)/s3/static.nrc.nl/bvhw/wp-content/blogs.dir/114/files/2019/07/ikje5bij3-1.png)
Tailwind Labs CEO Adam Wathan recently blamed AI for forcing him to lay off three workers.…
For a decade, AWS's position on multi-cloud was clear: don't.…
I've been working in and around the technology industry for a long time. Depending on how you count, it's 20 or 30 years. (I first started getting paid to put together PCs with a screwdriver when I was a teenager, but there isn't a good way to list that on LinkedIn.) And as soon as I felt like I was pretty sure that I was going to be able to pay the next month's rent without having to eat ramen noodles for two weeks before it was due, I felt like I'd really made it.
And as soon as you've made it, you owe it to everybody else to help out as much as you can. I don't know how to put it more simply than that. But for maybe the first decade of being in the "startup" world, where everybody was worried about appealing to venture capital investors, or concerned about getting jobs with the big tech companies, I was pretty convinced that one of the things that you couldn't do to help people was to talk about some of the things that were wrong. Especially if the things that were wrong were problems that, when described, might piss off the guys who were in charge of the industry.
But eventually, I got a little bit of power, mostly due to becoming a little bit visible in the industry, and I started to get more comfortable speaking my mind. Then, surprisingly, it turned out that... nothing happened. The sky didn't fall. I didn't get fired from my jobs. I certainly got targeted for harassment by bad actors, but that was largely due to my presence on social media, not simply because of my views. (And also because I tend to take a pretty provocative or antagonistic tone on social media when trying to frame an argument.) It probably helped that, in the workplace, I both tend to act like a normal person and am also generally good at my job.
I point all of this out not to pat myself on the back, or as if any of this is remarkable — it's certainly not — but because it's useful context for the current moment.
I have been around the technology industry, and the larger business world, long enough to have watched the practice of speaking up about moral issues go from completely unthinkable to briefly being given lip service to actively being persecuted both professionally and politically. The campaigns to stamp out issues of conscience amongst working people have vilified caring for others with names ranging from "political correctness" to "radicalism" to "virtue signaling" to "woke" and I'm sure I'm missing many more. This, despite the fact that there have always been thoughtful people in every organization who try to do the right thing; it's impossible to have a group of people of any significant size and not have some who have a shred of decency and humanity within them.
But the technology industry has an incredibly short memory, by design. We're always at the beginning of history, and so many people working in it have never encountered a time before this moment when there's been this kind of brutal backlash from their leaders against common decency. Many have never felt such pressure to tamp down their own impulses to be good to their colleagues, coworkers, collaborators and customers.
I want to encourage everyone who is afraid in this moment to find some comfort and some solace in the fact that we have been here before. Not in exactly this place, but in analogous ones. And also to know that there are many people who are also feeling the same combination of fear or trepidation about speaking up, but a compelling and irrepressible desire to do so. We've shifted the Overton window on what's acceptable multiple times before.
I am, plainly, exhorting you do to speak up about the current political moment and to call for action. There is some risk to this. There is less risk for everyone when more of us speak up.
In the United States, our government is lying to us about an illegal occupation of a major city, which has so far led to multiple deaths of innocents who were murdered by agents of the state. We have video evidence of what happened, and the most senior officials in our country have deliberately, blatantly and unrepentantly lied about what the videos show, while besmirching the good names of the people who were murdered. Just as the administration's most senior officials spread these lies, several of the most powerful and influential executives in the tech industry voluntarily met with the President, screened a propaganda film made expressly as a bribe for him, and have said nothing about either the murders or the lies about the murders.
These are certainly not the first wrongs by our government. These are not even the first such killings in Minnesota in recent years. But they are a new phase, and this occupation is a new escalation. This degree of lawless authoritarianism is new — tech leaders were not crafting golden ingots to bribe sitting leaders of the United States in the past. Military parades featuring banners bearing the face of Dear Leader, followed by ritual gift-giving in the throne room of the golden palace with the do-nothing failsons and conniving hangers-on of the aging strongman used to be the sort of thing we mocked about failing states, not things we emulated about them.
So, when our "leaders" have failed, and they have, we must become a leaderful community. This, I have a very positive feeling about. I've seen so many people who are willing to step up, to give of themselves, to use their voices. And I have all the patience in the world for those who may not be used to doing those things, because it can be hard to step into those shoes for the first time. If you're unfamiliar or uncomfortable with this work, or if the risk feels a little more scary because you carry the responsibility of caring for those around you, that's okay.
But I've been really heartened to see how many people have responded when I started talking about these ideas on LinkedIn — not usually the bastion of "political" speech. I don't write the usual hustle-bro career advice platitudes there, and instead laid out the argument for why people will need to choose a side, and should choose the side that their heart already knows that they're on. To my surprise, there's been near-universal agreement, even amongst many who don't agree with many of my other views.
It is already clear that business leaders are going to be compelled to speak up. It would be ideal if it is their own workers who lead them towards the words (and actions) that they put out into the world.
Those of us in the technology realm bear a unique responsibility here. It is the tools that we create which enable the surveillance and monitoring that agencies like ICE use to track down and threaten both their targets and those they attempt to intimidate away from holding them accountable. It is the wealth of our industry which isolates the tycoons who run our companies when they make irrational decisions like creating vanity films about the strongman's consort rather than pushing for the massive increase in ICE spending to instead go towards funding all of Section 8 housing, all of CHIP insurance, all school lunches, and 1/3 of all federal spending on K-12 education.
It takes practice to get comfortable using our voices. It takes repetition until leaders know we're not backing down. It takes perseverance until people in power understand they're going to have to act in response to the voices of their workers. But everyone has a voice. Now is your turn to use it.
When we speak, we make it easier for others to do so. When we all speak, we make change inevitable.
